


Pretty Bird

by Annabel7



Category: Treasure Island - Lavery, Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
Genre: F/M, Gen, It's not black sails but that was the only Walrus option I was given, Silver narrates, but he's terrible fun to write, national theatre production, nothing happens but silver being a fcking creep, sIlver is creepy as hell, tagging it as underage as a precaution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-12
Updated: 2020-05-12
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:20:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24151951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annabel7/pseuds/Annabel7
Summary: As the crew shares stories one night in the galley, Long John Silver sits back and watches, planning, thinking, and considering the role of the cabin girl.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 12





	Pretty Bird

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place after the storm, but before the stargazing scene.

_“Pretty bird!”_ Flint says, and the crew laughs.

Hands breaks off a bite of tack, and leans towards me to feed it to him, and Flint bites him. I smile. Captain Flint, the man, once broke a bottle of rum over a man’s head for offering up his rations once. Killed him too, though he swore to the crew that the man was only knocked out; I know because it was me and Bones that shouldered the corpse over the side of the ship during the second dogwatch.

Hands doesn’t smack the bird for the reaction, but I have half a mind to as Flint watches Jim peel the skin of her apple before taking a bite, and whistles again:

“ _Pretty bird!”_ and now I'm tempted to pull a tail feather from the bugger.

She is, the cabin girl, a pretty bird. And she's that too, a girl. Not that it’s the sort of thing that’s given much mind on a ship, especially a ship like this. She’s a bit slight on years, but I wasn’t much older, possibly younger than her, when a tavern maid pulled me into the jungle brush in Madagascar. Fourteen or sixteen, I reckon Jim is in that range, but she’s taller than my sisters ever were from what I remember. Jim could easily be older.

Still young, but I see her tilt her head in my direction before deciding whether or not to laugh at Hand’s unintelligible addition to the story at hand. She’s old enough to know what it feels like to _want_.

I test it; continue checking her skill at chess, because it all washes down to simple mathematics, like navigation, like cartography. All the starting points and paths of currents and lines and in the end it’s all just adding numbers until they work.

So I chuckle at the bad line, and Jim laughs loudly. If I didn’t have her yet, I will now.

“Cabin girl hasn’t said anything yet, let her tell a story,” I shout over the din of the galley.

“I don’t know any stories!” she’s got these big eyes like a swordfish; and I need to know if she’s as sharp as one too.

“Sure you do, working an inn like that on the coast, you have to get a fair share of strange sights.”

“Well…not really…” the crew doesn’t care, they’ve all started talking lowly to each other, at each other, but old Flint—

“ _Pieces of eight!”_ he shrieks, and they all look over as if the feathered bastard hasn’t ever spoken before.

“Go on, Jim. Speak, ” I try again, imploring. She bites her lip and it turns red in time with her face. Hard to tell in the lantern lights, but there’s a difference if you’re used to seeing her a certain shade.

“I suppose—There was this one fellow—real fancy, feathers in his cap, and pearl buttons. He wore a long pink duster with a bright green tie. I was still new there, with my grandma, my parents—I’d only been there for a few months. And I don’t remember his name, only that he had this dog that never stopped _barking_ it drove the guests mad, and it kept running about and escaping, and getting lost,” she laughs at some memory that no one else here knows, and distracts herself. It turns everyone off the story. I cough, and she looks up.

My girl.

How cold can I get before she stops? Let’s see.

I yawn, and I watch her soft little heart break.

“And that dog!” Jim continues, half-heartedly. She waits to be sure everyone is still watching her, those big saucer eyes on me twice. I cock an arm behind my head to lean back, and I listen again. She’s thinking now, not remembering, but constructing. “One night he gets out— _bark! Bark! Bark! Bark!_ —and we can all hear it through the whole bloody inn!” her language earns her a few quiet rumbles of laughter, but it’s not what she’s looking for, and I’m still bored by it. “But then it grows fainter, and fainter, and then—Nothin’! Nothing at all! Now his master, this fancy London man, or so we thought is gone too, but another guest—she says she’s seen him in _Bath_ before so we know he’s got a lot of money and lots of friends with it, so we all decided to go find the dog for the reward money,” the story doesn’t follow, but she’s trying, and she’s managed so far to sell it to this miserable lot.

“How d’you know he’d give you a reward?” Lucky asks.

“That’s what rich men do. They’ve got too much and lose it places. Hide it places and forget about it.” Now _that_ interests me. “Men like this sometimes just give it away! But never for free. So we go find the dog. Get the money.”

Jim goes on, weaves this unbelievable yarn about a sea creature reaching a massive tentacle out of the water along the rocky beach and taking the dog, leaving the man, miraculously found, sobbing and then vanishing in the night without paying her grandmother.

It’s only when the entire crew is laughing and pouring more grog around, and someone offers her a mug which she takes hesitantly, that she looks back up to me.

I nod, and I smile.

She drinks the grog with slight twitch of the noes.

Jim will be a good girl for the job, and devil take anyone who tries to stop me.

…. Looks like a ghost with those big eyes and pale skin—she’s usually below decks with me, so little of real daylight gets into the kitchens so she looks ethereal in the dark. Too much like a ghost sometimes, coming in and out of people’s heads as she pleases.

It’s so easy, so simple. I’m so close to the point that she’d walk the plank at my command on blind faith that I had a good reason to ask her.

She’s willing to lie for me, she just proved she can trick the _Walrus_ crew—all while endearing herself to them, earning their admiration, affection. The idiots might not trust an outsider but they will trust a pretty face that smiles at them like that.

Flint didn’t keep any formal books on treasure, but two shares of the piles of gold I watched him leave behind would be enough for castles. Seven ways—eight, including her, but the crew won’t want to—affection be damned when gold comes into question, will be pitiful in comparison. If I can separate her from the rich idiots she brought with her, convince her that the captain’s a wicked man, the doctor callus to her, and the squire careless…

The galley heats from the bodies the furnace baking tack. Jim, she’s smart as paint, we could sail this ship to a port from the island in a fortnight on our own, hire a quiet ship out of the Spanish Main and—well it will only be two weeks. Two weeks at sea, climbing rigging all bloody day in the sun. It will surely get to her head.

She’ll be a pirate when it’s over, and look the part too.

Her earring is new.

She’ll be passed out from the heat and the work in her cabin—an officer’s I think, and she’s not panicked by ghosts, but Flint outside her window screeching could add enough weight to my stories to seek assurance from company. Some guidance from company…

I watch her drink the grog even as Joan tips something out of her flask into it. 

…Better me than her and some friend getting drunk in the stable behind the Inn.

Jim laughs at a disgusting joke from George; Dick claps her on the back when she chokes, and his hand doesn’t move after she starts breathing again—

“Cabin girl! We’ve got work to do, lass.” I call for her and she apologetically pushes her way through the small crowd in an instant. Her spindly small hands clutch the mug of grog like a trophy.

“Silver, what did you think of my story?”

“You had them eating out of your pretty little hands,” she’s red as an apple.

“Thank you—I can help you clean up, but everyone’s still here and… That’s what you called me for? Isn’t it too early?”

“It is, Jim. That’s why we’re not washing up yet.” I stand up, with a grip on the chair, and she notices how close she was standing and takes a step aside.

“Then…where are we going?”

“Up on deck. I’m going to show you the stars.”


End file.
